Corsair Centennial Hopped Whiskey

Rating: 13/23 I tried Corsair Mosaic (15) first and found the hops created too much of a numbing one-note bitterness. I'm hopefully that this will be better balanced, but not betting on it. This said, I opened the Mosaic months ago and it has been sitting with a substantial amount of air for a large portion of that time, so side by siding might not be totally fair here. N: Wow, this nose has even more austere hops than the Mosaic does! It's super starkly bitter with a dry edge that borders on lemon, mint, and some random green vine (a little vegetal). Digging deep, there's a hint of malt crying out to be noticed, but that's it for the nose. Really not impressive. Actually unpleasant, though not horrifying. P: The palate is so much richer and more balanced than the nose suggested. The hops are big and bold with a stark, numbing bite to them, but they also lead into some malty nuttiness that makes me think a bit of buckwheat. There's a squirt of lemon and definitely clove. I get a bit of light vegetal vine merging into a little melon rind. Sucking this through my teeth to infuse air, I get a little toasty wood. The rest of the flavors overwhelm that though. The flavors seems like they almost come together, but they don't really. I like the direction this palate is going, but it needs to have the hops reduced and be aged in a barrel for a while to integrate everything. F: Numbing, a bit minty. Some buckwheat. Some malty sweetness. - Conclusion - I would try a version of this that spent a couple more years aging in an ex-bourbon barrel and be fairly optimistic. As it is though, this is rough. Hopefully the oxygen in my bottle will improve it. I'm having trouble deciding whether I like this or the Mosaic better. Right now, I'd take the Mosaic, but I suspect that's because of the air it's had. This does a better job of compensating for its hops, whereas the Mosaic does a better job of embracing them. I think that in time this is likely to become the better of the two, but comparing my fresh Centennial bottle against my long open Mosaic bottle, the Mosaic's flavors seems more integrated, which leads me to prefer it. I think this means that this is not better than a 14. I doubt that it's worse than a 13 though. Throwing some random other drams side by side with this and kind of hoping that I can reasonably compare them, I ding myself landing on a 13 here. I really hope that air will improve this, but for the time being it is more interesting than it is good. I seriously considered both a 12 and a 14. I started leaning toward a 12, but as my palate numbed I moved toward a 14. So I'm sticking with my 13.

Big citrus and green herbaceous aroma. Almost like gin. Tastes like it smells. Seriously citrus and fresh, herbal. A little sour and sharp. Fresh, complex, goes lightly sweet at the end. I like this a lot, which is surprising. I think it would be an amazing mixer.

Just......no. Rotten and foul, like old chemicals in an abandoned haunted theme park.